Intellectual Thuggery

This new form of an old disorder also shows that despite the orthodoxy on many campuses many left-liberals remain very afraid of classical liberal and conservative dissent.-John O. McGinnis

As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today. -Thomas Sowell

Speech codes are a widely used tool taken right out of the fascist toolbox.

If they can’t control how you act, then they’ll control how you speak. If they can’t control how you speak, then they’ll control how you think.

And if you act, speak, or think contrary to their demands, you will be punished. -Sean Davis

What these 20 scientists have done with their letter is the worst kind of irresponsible advocacy.

Attempts by powerful people to silence other scientists, especially in this brutal fashion, is a recipe for stifling scientific progress and for making poor policies. -Judith Curry

One person close to Ms Wild said she had also been warned that more personal attacks against her were to come. The BHP Billiton spokesperson called the campaign “highly personalised and unfair”.

The crusade reflected the generally hostile attitude to climate sceptics in Paris, with senior policy figures making clear that this time they were not welcome and their point of view was no longer valid.

In California, a professor recently asked students who voted for Trump to stand.

Students were then told that everyone not standing now had a basis for knowing who to fear and abhor for the future. -Ben Voth

In the fall of 2014, junior faculty member Cheryl Abbate told a student, who secretly recorded the exchange, that his defense of man-woman marriage was an unacceptable topic in her ethics class and compared his views to racism.

She said, “You can have whatever opinions you want but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, and sexist comments will not be tolerated.” And then she told the student he should drop the class.

And with that, as far as "The Los Angeles Times" is concerned, the debate is over. The Times is among mainstream media sources that quietly stopped giving a voice to climate-change deniers. -Danielle Elliot

A New Zealand university student body voted this week to reject a pro-life club on campus. Aukland City Harbour News reports pro-abortion students have been trying to abolish the pro-life club ever since it began in 2010. This week, they succeeded. Pending legal review, the Aukland University Student’s Association said it will no longer recognize the club.

The referendum also questioned whether clubs with a “similar ideology” should be banned from affiliating in the future.

SERIOUSLY JUST BE QUIET. ONLY APPOINTED/APPROVED WHITES CAN SPEAK (AND ONLY WHEN SPOKEN TO).

The right to speak freely is not the same as the right to rob others of their voices.

Understanding this argument requires an ability to detect and follow nuance, but nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.

No one should have to pass someone else's ideological purity test to be allowed to speak.

Leaders of the student newspaper at Princeton University have disbanded the publication’s independent editorial board, a move that comes after the group put forth a string of right-leaning opinions, including denouncing the women’s center for its radical feminist agenda and arguing in favor of due process.

Original Nazi Students Shouted Down Professor...

Nazi youth then showed up and disrupted Lessing's classes. Lessing was forced to give up his academic chair the following year.

In his account of what happened, Lessing later wrote that he could do nothing to prevent being "shouted down, threatened and denigrated" by student activists.

Three professors co-teaching an online course called “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs recently told their students via email that man-made climate change is not open for debate, and those who think otherwise have no place in their course.

“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email...

Beginning in 2003, software engineer William Connolley quietly removed the highly inconvenient references to the global cooling scare of the 1970s from Wikipedia, the world’s most influential and accessed informational source.

It had to be done. Too many skeptics were (correctly) pointing out that the scientific “consensus” during the 1960s and 1970s was that the Earth had been cooling for decades, and that nascent theorizing regarding the potential for a CO2-induced global warming were still questionable and uncertain. -Kenneth Richard